Qari Saifullah Akhtar

Qari Saifullah Akhtar (died 9 January 2017) was the co-founder of Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami and an al-Qaeda leader.

Biography
Qari Saifullah Akhtar was born in Karachi, Pakistan, and he was involved with jihadist groups since the early 1980s, cofounding Harkat-ul-Jihad al-Islami with Fazlur Rehman Khalil. In 1985, he became the leader of HUJI during the Soviet-Afghan War, and he became an ally of al-Qaeda, running a training camp at Rishkhor, Afghanistan before the US invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. In 2004, he was apprehended in the United Arab Emirates and handed over to Pakistan, but he was released in 2007, being thrown out of a car in a deserted area near Chakwal. On 26 February 2008, he was arrested in Lahore for his alleged involvement in the assassination attempt on Benazir Bhutto, and he was suspected of involvement in the Islamabad Marriott Hotel bombing that September. In August 2010, he was injured in a drone strike and arrested, but he was released four months later. He was killed in a raid in eastern Afghanistan in January 2017.